Guillermo Martinez: The Book of Murder

That first day she took dictation for two straight hours. She was fast, sure and, as an added miracle, made no spelling mistakes. Her hands on the keyboard hardly seemed to move. She adapted straight away to my voice and pace, and never lost the thread. Perfect, then, in every way? At almost thirty, I was starting to look with cruel melancholy into women’s futures and I couldn’t help noticing other things about her. Her hair, starting high on her forehead, was very fine and brittle and if you looked down on her from above (I dictated standing up), her parting was a little too wide. Also her jawline was not as firm as one might have wished, a slight fleshiness at her throat threatening in time to become a double chin. And before she sat down I noticed that from the waist down she suffered from the characteristic Argentinian asymmetry, as yet only incipient, of excessive hips. But all this lay far in the future, and for now her youth overcame any flaws.

As I opened the first notebook to begin dictating, she straightened her back in the chair and I confirmed, with disappointment, what I had suspected: her blouse fell straight over a completely flat chest. But might this not have been a convenient defence for Kloster, perhaps a decisive one? As I had recently found out, Kloster was married, and he would have had trouble introducing an eighteen-year-old nymphet to his wife if the girl had generous curves as well. But above all, if the writer wanted to work undistracted, wasn’t it a perfect arrangement? He had the youthful grace of her profile, which he could calmly admire while he worked, whilst avoiding any sexual tension that might have come from another, more dangerous contour? I wondered if Kloster had made this kind of calculation, this kind of secret deliberation. I wondered-as Pessoa had-if it was only I who was so vile, ‘vile in the literal sense of the word’. In any case, I approved of his choice.

At one point I suggested we have coffee. Displaying the same self-assurance with which she had made herself at home, she stood and, pointing at the plaster cast on my hand, said she’d make it if I told her where everything was. She mentioned that Kloster drank coffee constantly (actually, she didn’t say Kloster, she used his first name, and I wondered how close they had become) and that the first thing he’d done was instruct her how to make it. That first day I didn’t ask anything more about Kloster, because I was sufficiently intrigued by him to be able to wait until she and I had got to know each other better, but I did find out, as she gathered cups and saucers in the kitchen, almost everything I would ever know about Luciana. She was indeed at university, in her first year. She was studying biology but was thinking of changing subject. Mummy, daddy, an older brother in his final year of medicine, a much younger sister, aged seven, mentioned with an ambivalent smile, as if she were an endearing pest. A grandmother who’d been in an old people’s home for some time. A boyfriend discreetly slipped into the conversation, without actually mentioning his name, with whom she’d been going out for a year. Had she slept with the boyfriend? I made a few cynical remarks and she laughed. I decided she had, definitely. She’d studied ballet but given it up when she began at university, although she had retained the upright posture and something of the outward turn of the feet when standing. She’d been to England, on an exchange-with a grant from her bilingual school. In short, I reflected at the time, a proud expensive daughter, a finished example, perfectly educated and polished, of Argentina ’s middle class, seeking work much earlier than her friends. I wondered, but didn’t ask, why quite so early, but maybe it was simply a sign of her apparent maturity and independence. She really didn’t look as if she needed the small sum we’d agreed: she was still tanned from a long summer at the house by the sea that her parents owned in Villa Gesell, and her tiny handbag alone must have cost more than my old computer on the desk in front of her.

She took dictation for a couple of hours more and only once did she show any sign of tiredness: during a pause she bent her head to one side, then the other, and her neck, her pretty neck, made a sharp crack. When her time was up, she stood, collected the coffee cups, washed them up and left them to drain by the sink. She gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and left.

And this was the pattern from then on: a kiss on arrival, her little bag dropped, almost thrown, beside the sofa, two hours of dictation, coffee and a brief, smiling conversation in the narrow kitchen, two more hours’ work, and at a certain point, unfailingly, the bending of her head to one side then the other, half painfully, half seductively, and the sharp crack of her vertebrae. I got to know her clothes, the changes in her face-sometimes more sleepy than others-the variations in hairstyle, the coded signals of her make-up. At one point I did ask about Kloster, but by that time I was much more interested in her than in him. She had indeed started to seem to me perfect in every way, and I was dreaming up improbable scenarios in which I kept her working for me. But Kloster, apparently, was perfect in every way as a boss. He was considerate, giving her time off for exams, and she let me know, tactfully, that he paid her almost double what she’d agreed with me. But what was the man like, the mysterious Mr K, I insisted. What did I want to know? she asked, disconcerted. Everything, of course. Didn’t she know that we writers were professional gossips? No one knew him, I explained; he didn’t give interviews and photos of him hadn’t appeared with his books for a long time now. She looked surprised. It was true, she’d heard him turn down interviews several times, but she’d never imagined there could be anything mysterious about him: he didn’t appear to have any secrets. He must have been a little over forty, was tall and slim; in his youth he’d been a long-distance swimmer, there were cups and medals from that time in his study, and he sometimes still went swimming late at night at a club near his house.

She’d carefully chosen the few words she used to describe him, as if she wanted to make sure she sounded neutral, and I wondered if she was interested in him in any way. So he was tall, slim, with broad swimmer’s shoulders, I summed up. Attractive? I fired the word at her. She laughed, as if she’d already considered and discounted it: “No, at least not to me.” And she added, sounding a little shocked: “He’s old enough to be my father.” And anyway, she said, he was very serious. They too worked for four hours every morning. He had a lovely little girl, four years old, who was always drawing pictures for Luciana and would have liked her for a big sister. The daughter played on her own in a room on the ground floor next to the study while they worked. His wife never appeared-Luciana did find this a little mysterious. She’d only ever seen her a couple of times. Sometimes she heard her shouting something at the little girl, or calling her from upstairs. Maybe she was a depressive, or perhaps she had some other illness-she seemed to spend a large part of the day in bed. It was he who mainly looked after the child and they always finished on time so that he could take her to her nursery school. And how did he work? He dictated to her in the mornings, as I did, every so often sinking into silences that seemed to last for ever. He was always on his feet, pacing like a caged animal; one moment he was at the other end of the room, the next moment he was behind her. And he drank coffee-she’d already told me this. By the end of the day they’d only done about half a page. He rewrote it, changing every word, again and again, making her read the same sentence over and over. What was he writing? A new novel? What was it about? A novel, yes, about a sect of religious assassins. Or so it seemed for now, at least. She had lent him an annotated Bible of her father’s, so he could check a quotation. And what did he think of himself? What did I mean? she asked. Did he consider himself superior? She thought for a moment, as if trying to remember something specific, some remark, something slipped into the conversation. “He’s never talked about his books,” she said doubtfully, “but one day, as we were going over the same sentence for the tenth time, he said that a writer had to be a beetle and God at the same time.”